Quantum computation is an emerging technology that utilizes quantum effects to achieve significant, and in some cases exponential, speedups of algorithms over their classical counterparts. The growing importance of machine learning has in recent years led to a host of studies that investigate the promise of quantum computers for machine learning [1, 2, 12, 13, 17, 21-23]. While a number of important quantum speedups have been found, the majority of these speedups are due to replacing a classical subroutine with an equivalent albeit faster quantum algorithm. The true potential of quantum algorithms may therefore remain underexploited since quantum algorithms have been constrainted to follow the same methodology behind traditional machine learning methods [2, 7, 22]. Here we consider an alternate approach: we devise a new machine learning algorithm that is tailored to the speedups that quantum computers can provide.

Training structured prediction models is time-consuming. However, most existing approaches only use a single machine, thus, the advantage of computing power and the capacity for larger data sets of multiple machines have not been exploited. In this work, we propose an efficient algorithm for distributedly training structured support vector machines based on a distributed block-coordinate descent method. Both theoretical and experimental results indicate that our method is efficient.

In this paper we study predictive pattern mining problems where the goal is to construct a predictive model based on a subset of predictive patterns in the database. Our main contribution is to introduce a novel method called safe pattern pruning (SPP) for a class of predictive pattern mining problems. The SPP method allows us to efficiently find a superset of all the predictive patterns in the database that are needed for the optimal predictive model. The advantage of the SPP method over existing boosting-type method is that the former can find the superset by a single search over the database, while the latter requires multiple searches. The SPP method is inspired by recent development of safe feature screening. In order to extend the idea of safe feature screening into predictive pattern mining, we derive a novel pruning rule called safe pattern pruning (SPP) rule that can be used for searching over the tree defined among patterns in the database. The SPP rule has a property that, if a node corresponding to a pattern in the database is pruned out by the SPP rule, then it is guaranteed that all the patterns corresponding to its descendant nodes are never needed for the optimal predictive model. We apply the SPP method to graph mining and item-set mining problems, and demonstrate its computational advantage.

Adaptive Filter for Automatic Identification of Multiple Faults in a Noisy OTDR Profile Jean Pierre von der Weid, Mario H. Souto, Joaquim D. Garcia, and Gustavo C. Amaral November 7, 2018 Abstract We present a novel methodology able to distinguish meaningful level shifts from typical signal fluctuations. A two-stage regularization filtering can accurately identify the location of the significant level-shifts with an efficient parameter-free algorithm. The developed methodology demands low computational effort and can easily be embedded in a dedicated processing unit. Our case studies compare the new methodology with current available ones and show that it is the most adequate technique for fast detection of multiple unknown level-shifts in a noisy OTDR profile. 1 Introduction The central problem in fiber monitoring is the detection of small faults or losses most commonly performed by inspecting the trace of an Optical Time Domain Reflectometer (OTDR) [1]. These faults appear as small level shifts in a slowly varying backscattered optical power, eventually masked by the detector noise. Averaging over many OTDR shots is usually required to get access to the information needed. However, measurement time is of paramount importance in network monitoring, so that signal processing and filtering is a fundamental tool to improve time and sensitivity of the overall process. Moreover, in the case of wavelength multiplexed optical networks (WDM-PON) the problem is still worse because coherent backscattered power fluctuations (CRN) cannot be averaged out by summing up many OTDR shots [2].

Early detection and precise characterization of emerging topics in text streams can be highly useful in applications such as timely and targeted public health interventions and discovering evolving regional business trends. Many methods have been proposed for detecting emerging events in text streams using topic modeling. However, these methods have numerous shortcomings that make them unsuitable for rapid detection of locally emerging events on massive text streams. In this paper, we describe Semantic Scan (SS) that has been developed specifically to overcome these shortcomings in detecting new spatially compact events in text streams. Semantic Scan integrates novel contrastive topic modeling with online document assignment and principled likelihood ratio-based spatial scanning to identify emerging events with unexpected patterns of keywords hidden in text streams. This enables more timely and accurate detection and characterization of anomalous, spatially localized emerging events. Semantic Scan does not require manual intervention or labeled training data, and is robust to noise in real-world text data since it identifies anomalous text patterns that occur in a cluster of new documents rather than an anomaly in a single new document. We compare Semantic Scan to alternative state-of-the-art methods such as Topics over Time, Online LDA, and Labeled LDA on two real-world tasks: (i) a disease surveillance task monitoring free-text Emergency Department chief complaints in Allegheny County, and (ii) an emerging business trend detection task based on Yelp reviews. On both tasks, we find that Semantic Scan provides significantly better event detection and characterization accuracy than competing approaches, while providing up to an order of magnitude speedup.

In this paper we construct a learning architecture for high dimensional time series sampled by sensor arrangements. Using a redundant wavelet decomposition on a graph constructed over the sensor locations, our algorithm is able to construct discriminative features that exploit the mutual information between the sensors. The algorithm then applies scattering networks to the time series graphs to create the feature space. We demonstrate our method on a machine olfaction problem, where one needs to classify the gas type and the location where it originates from data sampled by an array of sensors. Our experimental results clearly demonstrate that our method outperforms classical machine learning techniques used in previous studies.

Large CNNs have delivered impressive performance in various computer vision applications. But the storage and computation requirements make it problematic for deploying these models on mobile devices. Recently, tensor decompositions have been used for speeding up CNNs. In this paper, we further develop the tensor decomposition technique. We propose a new algorithm for computing the low-rank tensor decomposition for removing the redundancy in the convolution kernels. The algorithm finds the exact global optimizer of the decomposition and is more effective than iterative methods. Based on the decomposition, we further propose a new method for training low-rank constrained CNNs from scratch. Interestingly, while achieving a significant speedup, sometimes the low-rank constrained CNNs delivers significantly better performance than their non-constrained counterparts. On the CIFAR-10 dataset, the proposed low-rank NIN model achieves $91.31\%$ accuracy (without data augmentation), which also improves upon state-of-the-art result. We evaluated the proposed method on CIFAR-10 and ILSVRC12 datasets for a variety of modern CNNs, including AlexNet, NIN, VGG and GoogleNet with success. For example, the forward time of VGG-16 is reduced by half while the performance is still comparable. Empirical success suggests that low-rank tensor decompositions can be a very useful tool for speeding up large CNNs.

Protein structure prediction has been a "grand challenge" problem in the structure biology over the last few decades. Protein quality assessment plays a very important role in protein structure prediction. In the paper, we propose a new protein quality assessment method which can predict both local and global quality of the protein 3D structural models. Our method uses both multi and single model quality assessment method for global quality assessment, and uses chemical, physical, geometrical features, and global quality score for local quality assessment. CASP9 targets are used to generate the features for local quality assessment. We evaluate the performance of our local quality assessment method on CASP10, which is comparable with two stage-of-art QA methods based on the average absolute distance between the real and predicted distance. In addition, we blindly tested our method on CASP11, and the good performance shows that combining single and multiple model quality assessment method could be a good way to improve the accuracy of model quality assessment, and the random forest technique could be used to train a good local quality assessment model.

Deep Gaussian processes (DGPs) are multi-layer hierarchical generalisations of Gaussian processes (GPs) and are formally equivalent to neural networks with multiple, infinitely wide hidden layers. DGPs are nonparametric probabilistic models and as such are arguably more flexible, have a greater capacity to generalise, and provide better calibrated uncertainty estimates than alternative deep models. This paper develops a new approximate Bayesian learning scheme that enables DGPs to be applied to a range of medium to large scale regression problems for the first time. The new method uses an approximate Expectation Propagation procedure and a novel and efficient extension of the probabilistic backpropagation algorithm for learning. We evaluate the new method for non-linear regression on eleven real-world datasets, showing that it always outperforms GP regression and is almost always better than state-of-the-art deterministic and sampling-based approximate inference methods for Bayesian neural networks. As a by-product, this work provides a comprehensive analysis of six approximate Bayesian methods for training neural networks.

Extracting the underlying low-dimensional space where high-dimensional signals often reside has long been at the center of numerous algorithms in the signal processing and machine learning literature during the past few decades. At the same time, working with incomplete (partly observed) large scale datasets has recently been commonplace for diverse reasons. This so called {\it big data era} we are currently living calls for devising online subspace learning algorithms that can suitably handle incomplete data. Their envisaged objective is to {\it recursively} estimate the unknown subspace by processing streaming data sequentially, thus reducing computational complexity, while obviating the need for storing the whole dataset in memory. In this paper, an online variational Bayes subspace learning algorithm from partial observations is presented. To account for the unawareness of the true rank of the subspace, commonly met in practice, low-rankness is explicitly imposed on the sought subspace data matrix by exploiting sparse Bayesian learning principles. Moreover, sparsity, {\it simultaneously} to low-rankness, is favored on the subspace matrix by the sophisticated hierarchical Bayesian scheme that is adopted. In doing so, the proposed algorithm becomes adept in dealing with applications whereby the underlying subspace may be also sparse, as, e.g., in sparse dictionary learning problems. As shown, the new subspace tracking scheme outperforms its state-of-the-art counterparts in terms of estimation accuracy, in a variety of experiments conducted on simulated and real data.